Is AI The Fight Club of Legal Technology ?

May 15, 2024

Artificial Intelligence has become the biggest buzz word in legal technology since, well the last biggest buzzword.  ECA, TAR, Blockchain, Analytics, Big Data, Collaboration, Disruption, Innovation.

Every 6 months we have a new “big thing” and right now it’s AI.

Articles are constantly harping on the rise of the machines that AI portends. Gartner includes AI on their list of the top 10 strategic technology trends of 2019 and even estimates that 80% of emerging technologies will be built on a foundation of artificial intelligence by 2021. In a Law Technology Today article, Andrew Ng, Co-Founder of Coursera and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, says AI is the new electricity. “Just as electricity transformed almost everything 100 years ago,” he explains, “today I actually have a hard time thinking of an industry that I don’t think AI will transform in the next several years.”

https://www.lawtechnologytoday.org/2019/04/artificial-intelligence-will-change-e-discovery-in-the-next-three-years

And in that same article, Ajith Samuel technologist and co-founder of eDiscovery company Exterro, says that:

  1. Using AI will become “frictionless,” meaning that it will be ever more seamlessly integrated into the e-discovery process.
  2. AI will move out of the review phase, earlier in the EDRM, helping legal teams get to the facts of the matter faster, cheaper, and smarter than ever before.

And let’s not forget the 2015 survey by Altman Weil of 320 firms with at least 50 lawyers on staff which found that 35 percent of the leaders at those firms (responding anonymously) believed some form of AI would replace first-year associates in the coming decade. 20 percent of those same respondents said second- and third-year attorneys could also be replaced by technology over the same period and half said that paralegals could be killed off by computers. (See graphic below)

But if we are to believe the latest ILTA survey, that simply isn’t happening. The annual survey of the International Legal Technology Association was released on Nov 5 2020 and reported answers from 537 firms, representing more than 116,000 attorneys and 240,000 total users.

With regards to IA, it finds that just over 50% of respondents are not “…presently pursuing any IA option” and only 25% are actively researching an AI option. Respondents with active pilot projects or study groups were 7% and 4% respectively with only 10% reporting an active AI tool deployment.  See graphic below

https://www.iltanet.org/resources/publications/surveys/2019ts?ssopc=1

So what is going on here? We hear lots of talk about AI but not much actual usage. Part of the problem is, I believe, definitional and actual definitions of AI are in short supply.

One recent article broke out AI into 6 categories

  • Due diligence – Litigators perform due diligence with the help of AI tools to uncover background information. We’ve decided to include contract review, legal research and electronic discovery in this section.
  • Prediction technology – An AI software generates results that forecast litigation outcome.
  • Legal analytics – Lawyers can use data points from past case law, win/loss rates and a judge’s history to be used for trends and patterns.
  • Document automation – Law firms use software templates to create filled out documents based on data input.
  • Intellectual property – AI tools guide lawyers in analyzing large IP portfolios and drawing insights from the content.
  • Electronic billing – Lawyers’ billable hours are computed automatically.

And an actual standard (or standards) for AI has been slow to develop with the first just recently published by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) which adopted and published its “Principles on AI”   on the Law and AI blog.  http://www.lawandai.com/ 

But in all that discussion, where are the AI use propositions for eDiscovery? Well the problem there is that eDiscovery vendors are traditionally close mouthed about their systems. And since a primary feature of AI as mentioned by Ajith Samuel above is its “frictionless” adoption, then AI implementation is hidden by both design and practice. Legal technology has become more Fight Club than computer lab and AI has become the worst example of that proposition.

I’ve written before that all this emphasis on new technology reminds me of my old friend, the late Browning Marean. He was a great fan of the writings of Ray Kurzweil, the technologist and futurist who wrote The Age of The Intelligent Machine. Browning’s favorite Kurzweil was The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, which posited that technological advances would irreversibly transform people as they augment their minds and bodies with genetic alterations, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence.

I however am more mindful of another tenet of the Singularity, that exponential increase in technologies will lead to a point where progress is so rapid it outstrips humans’ ability to comprehend it. To me we are losing sight of the proposition that people are slow and computers fast but people are smart and computers are dumb.

And in fact, some of today’s greatest minds in technology fell the same way Stephen Hawking has stated, in an op-ed which appeared in The Independent in 2014, “Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks..” His fear? As posted in a separate interview  with BBC, it was simply stated: “humans, limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete and would be superseded by A.I.”

Hawking recently joined Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and hundreds of others in issuing a letter unveiled at the International Joint Conference Buenos Aires, Argentina warning that artificial intelligence can potentially be more dangerous than nuclear weapons. Even Bill Gates has expressed concerns and during a Q&A session on Reddit in January 2015, said “I am in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence. First, the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent. That should be positive if we manage it well. A few decades after that though the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern. I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don’t understand why some people are not more concerned.”

Sound far-fetched? Well then, consider it from our perspective as attorneys. What is the ethical dilemma of bestowing legal responsibilities on robots? Does not all this talk of AI undermine our ethical duties to manage our client’s matters if we don’t really understand how these programs work?

As far back as 2013, Peter Geraghty (Director of the ETHICSearch, ABA Center for Professional Responsibility) and Susan J. Michmerhuizen (ETHICSearch Research Counsel) wrote an article for Your ABA Enews called Duty to Supervise Nonlawyers: Ignorance is Not Bliss. Although the article focused on issues with paralegals and support staff, I would suggest that computers also qualify as non- lawyers and the concerns mentioned in the article should apply to them and the technical experts who use them as well

This issue arises constantly when vendors run computer searches of documents and then produce directly to opposing counsel. The non-supervised release of privileged material can be an enormous problem for a firm, so much so that Geraghty and Michmerhuizen noted an excerpt from Comment [3] to Rule 5.3 which states:

… Nonlawyers Outside the Firm

[3]A lawyer may use nonlawyers outside the firm to assist the lawyer in rendering legal services to the client. Examples include the retention of an investigative or paraprofessional service, hiring a document management company to create and maintain a database for complex litigation, sending client documents to a third party for printing or scanning, and using an Internet-based service to store client information. When using such services outside the firm, a lawyer must make reasonable efforts to ensure that the services are provided in a manner that is compatible with the lawyer’s professional obligations.

Keep this in mind when retaining a technical expert or using software to search and produce. Do you really understand what is going on? How much work being done by computers are you actively supervising in a knowledgeable manner? In these days of a duty of technical competence, attorneys cannot simply delegate to others, even their clients, the responsibility of understanding technology. I would suggest that blindly relying on AI or other computer intelligence to make decisions does not rise to that necessary level of understanding.

Always remember that technology is a tool and humans use tools not vice versa. The ultimate decision-making about what tool to use and how to use it resides with you, the attorney. As I have said before, we need to keep the attorney in AI.                                                                                                        

It’s not enough to be aware of AI, we have to understand AI. Or, as the great technologist Elvis Aaron Presley once said, “A little less conversation, a little more action please.”


ELECTRONIC DISCOVERY IN CRIMINAL CASES

July 15, 2022

ORIGINAL STANDARD

Discussions about electronic discovery have traditionally focused on civil matters because civil cases have historically been more document intensive and thus that discovery process has been more richly nuanced. In addition, when criminal matters do have relevant documents, the discovery standard has been the so-called Brady rule, named after the landmark Supreme Court ruling Brady v. Maryland (373 U.S. 83 (1963) which held that prosecutors are only required to share evidence deemed exculpatory of the defendant.

In 2012, eDiscovery expert Craig Ball wrote in a column called Thoughtful Guidelines for E-Discovery in Criminal Cases “… apart from meeting Brady obligations, I think most lawyers regard criminal law as an area where there is no discovery, let alone this new-fangled e-discovery.More recently, a 2019 article in the New York Times mentioned that defense lawyers often called the Brady approach the “blindfold” law because it kept them in the dark and forced them into plea bargains without any knowledge of precisely what documents the prosecutors had in their possession. 

But that standard is changing.

CHANGING STANDARD

In 2005, Judge Marcia Pechman of the Western District of Washington had just concluded a white-collar criminal case brought by the government against Kevin Lawrence and his company, Znetix.  That case had nearly 1.5 million scanned electronic documents, at the time an extremely high document volume which caused both logistical and budgetary problems for the Court. 

Judge Pechman decided to convene a group of attorneys from the U. S. Defenders Office and the US Attorney in Seattle to discuss more efficient and cost-effective ways to deal with electronic documents in large cases.  This group included Russ Aoki, then a Criminal Justice Act (CJA) Panel attorney and now Coordinating Defense Attorney in complex matters for the Defenders, who had represented Mr. Lawrence.

I was privileged to be the only non-case attorney in the group, which went on to create a set of best practices policies for large document cases and wiretap surveillance evidence. Those policies were in effect in the Seattle federal court as a local rule for many years before other similar groups began meeting around the country. The eventual result of those meetings was a protocol released in 2012 by a Joint Technology Working Group of federal criminal practitioners created by the Director of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts (the supervising agency of the U.S. Defenders Office) and the U.S. Attorney General.

Then last year came the culmination of several years of meetings and discussions on this subject in which Atty Aoki was actively involved: an actual rule change.

Effective Dec 1, 2019, Federal Rule of Evidence 16.1 Pretrial Discovery Conference; Request for Court Action was changed to read:

(a) Discovery Conference. No later than 14 days after the arraignment, the attorney for the government and the defendant’s attorney must confer and try to agree on a timetable and procedures for pretrial disclosure under Rule 16.

(b) Request for Court Action. After the discovery conference, one or both parties may ask the court to determine or modify the time, place, manner, or other aspects of disclosure to facilitate preparation for trial.

Additionally, the note to the new rule references the 2012 Joint ESI Protocol, the first time that protocol has been referenced in a rule.  At roughly the same time, the Western District of Washington local criminal rules were amended to also reference the Joint Protocol and specifically use the Meet & Confer task checklist from that protocol. This was the first time either the ESI Protocol is referenced and the checklist used in a local rule. As Attorney Aoki told me, “We know because we looked at every local rule in all 94 jurisdictions.”

At the same time, many states are beginning to undertake similar changes to criminal discovery rules. Foremost in that movement has been New York which passed changes which went into effect this month requiring all prosecutorial material to be shared early in the case. For more on the New York changes see this article.

DRIVERS OF CHANGE

What is driving these changes? More than 90 percent of documents created today are generated in electronic format, so data size is exploding. At the same time, the diversity of data types continues to increase as 88 percent of the US population uses the Internet every day and 91 percent of adults use social media regularly.

Social media, mobile device content and cloud storage content are all now routinely part of the definition of relevant ESI.  See Social Media Evidence in Criminal Proceedings: An Uncertain Frontier from Georgetown Law here as well as a recent article in California Lawyer by Atty. Robert Hill, an associate at Eisner Gorin LLP, a boutique criminal defense firm in Los Angeles.

And even more exotic types of ESI loom in the future of litigation.  In a November 2019 article in Law.com, Judge Andrew Peck (Ret.), of counsel at DLA Piper, noted that  “There are already news reports of Fitbits and pacemakers being looked at in criminal cases to show that the digital data contradicts the defendant’s story of what happened.”  The same article mentions a conversation with Andrew Hessel, president of Humane Genomics, a seed stage company that makes cancer-fighting viruses, in which he discusses data definition of genomic material and the fact that viruses can now be defined so precisely as to allow printing of their data “maps”.

EXCEPTION TO NEW STANDARD

I should note, however, the exception that courts have carved out for material on cell phones. In Riley v. California, 134 S. Ct. 2473 (2014), the US Supreme Court unanimously ruled that police may not search the cell phones of criminal suspects upon arrest without a warrant. In Carpenter v U.S, No. 16-402, 585 U.S. (2018), the court held in a 5-4 decision that accessing historical records containing the physical locations of cellphones without a search warrant violates the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Both opinions were authored by Chief Justice Roberts, and both hold that that smartphones and other electronic devices are not in the same category as wallets, briefcases, and vehicles which are subject to a limited initial examination upon arrest. Rather, said Chief Justice Roberts in the Riley opinion, cell phones are “now such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life that the proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude they were an important feature of human anatomy.” 

He went on to note that cellphones “are based on technology nearly inconceivable just a few decades ago” when the Court had upheld the search of an arrestee’s pack of cigarettes. Today, he wrote, citizens today have a reasonable expectation of privacy for information on their cell phones noting “Our answer to the question of what police must do before searching a cell phone seized incident to an arrest is accordingly simple — get a warrant.”

Another exception to these developing standards is seizures at the US border.  Entry into the US has long been a separate category as many observers argue the US Constitution cannot apply to non-citizens who are still outside the US.  That discussion is beyond the scope of this article but a good starting point is a blog post I did on the subject for CloudNine.  

CONCLUSION

In addition to pointing out the clear differences between civil and criminal discovery standards, the secondary point of this article is to note that while criminal defense attorneys have a duty to preserve and produce electronically stored information (ESI) just as their civil counterparts do, that most state and federal criminal discovery is statutory, or rule-based.  But constitutional concepts apply in both arenas in order to ensure a fair trial and due process, including the right against self-incrimination and against unreasonable searches and seizures.

For a very good overview of all the issues involved in criminal eDiscovery practice can be found in Criminal Ediscovery: A Pocket Guide for Judges, a 2015 publication of the  Federal Judicial Center. It focuses on a number of issues and in greater detail than we can cover in this post and is an excellent resource. It is authored by Sean Broderick, National Litigation Support Administrator, Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, Defender Services Office; Donna Lee Elm, Federal Defender Middle District of Florida; Andrew Goldsmith, Associate Deputy Attorney General & National Criminal Discovery Coordinator U.S. Department of Justice; John Haried, Co-Chair, eDiscovery Working Group — EOUSA U.S. Department of Justice and Kirian Raj, Senior Counsel to the Deputy Attorney General U.S. Department of Justice. I highly recommend it.


CAN WE KEEP THE ATTORNEY IN AI OR IS ALL THE HYPE JUST FIGHT CLUB 2?

July 7, 2022

Great post this week by Doug Austin on his eDiscovery Today blog. Called Setting Realistic Expectations About AI in eDiscovery: eDiscovery Best Practices, it covered a new article in ILTA’s Peer to Peer Magazine entitle The Humans Stay in the Picture: 4 Realities of AI in Modern eDiscovery. The author of that article, Dr. Gina Taranto of ProSearch, made four keys points about AI but one in particlualr caught my eye.

Her third bullet poitn was called “Humans Stay In the Picture” and basically said that no matter how sophisticated the technology, you still need planning, training, QC and analysis and that “Humans are required for all of that.”

That brought to my mind an article I wrote in 2020 called “IS AI THE FIGHT CLUB OF LEGAL TECHNOLOGY?” I’ve reposted it below and even though some of the surveys and stats are out of date, the emphasis is still the same as what Dr. Taranto wrote. … let’s keep the attorney in AI.


Artificial Intelligence has become the biggest buzz word in legal technology since, well the last biggest buzzword. ECA, TAR, Blockchain, Analytics, Big Data, Collaboration, Disruption, Innovation.

Every 6 months we have a new “big thing” and right now it’s AI. Articles are constantly harping on the rise of the machines that AI portends. Gartner includes AI on their list of the top 10 strategic
technology trends of 2019 and even estimates that 80% of emerging technologies will be built on a foundation of artificial intelligence by

In a Law Technology Today article , Andrew Ng, Co-Founder of Coursera and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, says AI is the new electricity. “Just as electricity transformed
almost everything 100 years ago,” he explains, “today I actually have a hard time thinking of an industry that I don’t think AI will transform in the next several years.”

And in that same article, Ajith Samuel technologist and co-founder of eDiscovery company Exterro, says that using AI will become “frictionless,” meaning that it will be ever more seamlessly integrated into the e-discovery process. He feels that AI will move out of the review phase, earlier in the EDRM, helping legal teams get to the facts of the matter faster, cheaper, and smarter than ever before. Ultimately AI will play an increasing role in orchestrating the e-discovery process, streamlining the process and improving efficiency.

And let’s not forget the 2015 survey by Altman Weil of 320 firms with at least 50 lawyers on staff which found that 35 percent of the leaders at those firms (responding anonymously) believed some form of AI would replace first-year associates in the coming decade. 20 percent of those same respondents said second- and third-year attorneys could also be replaced by technology over the same period and half said that paralegals could be killed off by computers. (See graphic below)

But if we are to believe the latest ILTA survey, that simply isn’t happening. The annual survey of the International Legal Technology Association was released on Nov 5, 2020, and reported answers from 537
firms, representing more than 116,000 attorneys and 240,000 total users. With regards to IA, it finds that just over 50% of respondents are not “…presently pursuing any IA option” and only 25% are actively
researching an AI option. Respondents with active pilot projects or study groups were 7% and 4% respectively with only 10% reporting an active AI tool deployment. (See graphic here )


So, what is going on here? We hear lots of talk about AI but not much actual usage. Part of the problem is, I believe, definitional and actual definitions of AI are in short supply.

One recent article broke out AI into 6 categories
 Due diligence – Litigators perform due diligence with the help of AI tools to uncover background information. We’ve decided to include contract review, legal research and electronic discovery in this section.
 Prediction technology – An AI software generates results that forecast litigation outcome.
 Legal analytics – Lawyers can use data points from past case law, win/loss rates and a judge’s history to be used for trends and patterns.
 Document automation – Law firms use software templates to create filled out documents based on data input.
 Intellectual property – AI tools guide lawyers in analyzing large IP portfolios and drawing insights from the content.
 Electronic billing – Lawyers’ billable hours are computed automatically. (See )

And an actual standard (or standards) for AI has been slow to develop with the first just recently published by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) which adopted
and published its “Principles on AI” on the Law and AI blog.

But in all that discussion, where are the AI use propositions for eDiscovery? Well, the problem there is that eDiscovery vendors are traditionally close mouthed about their systems. And since a primary
feature of AI as mentioned by Ajith Samuel above is its “frictionless” adoption, then AI implementation is hidden by both design and practice.


Legal technology has become more Fight Club than computer lab and AI has become the worst example of that proposition.

I’ve written before that all this emphasis on new technology reminds me of my old friend, the late Browning Marean. He was a great fan of the writings of Ray Kurzweil, the technologist and futurist who wrote The Age of The Intelligent Machine. Browning’s favorite Kurzweil was “The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology”, which posited that technological advances would irreversibly transform people as they augment their minds and bodies with genetic alterations, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence.


I however am more mindful of another tenet of the Singularity, that exponential increase in technologies will lead to a point where progress is so rapid it outstrips humans’ ability to comprehend it. To me we are
losing sight of the proposition that people are slow and computers fast, but people are smart and computers are dumb.

And in fact, some of today’s greatest minds in technology fell the same way Stephen Hawking has stated, in an op-ed which appeared in The Independent in 2014, “Success in creating AI would be the biggest
event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks.” His fear? As posted in a separate interview with BBC, it was simply stated: “humans, limited by slow
biological evolution, couldn’t compete and would be superseded by A.I.”

Hawking recently joined Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and hundreds of others in issuing a letter unveiled at the International Joint Conference Buenos Aires, Argentina warning that artificial intelligence can
potentially be more dangerous than nuclear weapons. Even Bill Gates has expressed concerns and during a Q&A session on Reddit in January 2015, said “I am in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence. First, the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent. That should be positive if we manage it well. A few decades after that though the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern. I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don’t understand why some people are not more concerned.”

Sound far-fetched? Well then, consider it from our perspective as attorneys. What is the ethical dilemma of bestowing legal responsibilities on robots? Does not all this talk of AI undermine our ethical duties to manage our client’s matters if we don’t really understand how these programs work?

As far back as 2013, Peter Geraghty (Director of the ETHICSearch, ABA Center for Professional Responsibility) and Susan J. Michmerhuizen (ETHICSearch Research Counsel) wrote an article for Your ABA Enews called “Duty to Supervise Nonlawyers: Ignorance is Not Bliss”. Although the article focused on issues with paralegals and support staff, I would suggest that computers also qualify as non-lawyers and the concerns mentioned in the article should apply to them and the technical experts who use them as well.

This issue arises constantly when vendors run computer searches of documents and then produce directly to opposing counsel. The non-supervised release of privileged material can be an enormous problem
for a firm, so much so that Geraghty and Michmerhuizen noted an excerpt from Comment [3] to Rule 5.3 which states:


… Nonlawyers Outside the Firm
[3]A lawyer may use nonlawyers outside the firm to assist the lawyer in
rendering legal services to the client. Examples include the retention of
an investigative or paraprofessional service, hiring a document
management company to create and maintain a database for complex
litigation, sending client documents to a third party for printing or
scanning, and using an Internet-based service to store client
information. When using such services outside the firm, a lawyer must
make reasonable efforts to ensure that the services are provided in a
manner that is compatible with the lawyer’s professional obligations.

Keep this in mind when retaining a technical expert or using software to search and produce. Do you really understand what is going on? How much work being done by computers are you actively supervising in a knowledgeable manner? In these days of a duty of technical competence, attorneys cannot simply delegate to others, even their clients, the responsibility of understanding technology. I would suggest that blindly relying on AI or other computer intelligence to make decisions does not rise to that necessary level of understanding.

Always remember that technology is a tool and humans use tools not vice versa. The ultimate decision-making about what tool to use and how to use it resides with you, the attorney. As I have said before, we
need to keep the attorney in AI.


It’s not enough to be aware of AI, we have to understand AI. As that great technologist Elvis Aaron Presley once said, “A little less conversation, a little more action please.”


When ESI Production Goes Wrong and How to (Successfully) Challenge It

January 24, 2022

I recently wrote an article for the Federal Defenders about US v Morgan (Western District of New York, 1:18-CR-00108 EAW, decided Oct 8, 2020). The case is an example of diligent defense counsel challenging the government on how it produced terabytes of data and features a detailed analysis of those productions and their failings by Judge Elizabeth A. Wolford which resulted in a dismissal without prejudice.

You can read the entire article on the Defenders blog below


EDRM Announces the First Annual Gayle McCormick O’Connor Spirit Award

December 6, 2020

Last week on EDiscovery day, the EDRM honored Gayle O’Connor as the first recipient of the annual Spirit Award named in her honor. Many thanks to the folks at the EDRM and especially the Spirit Committee who I specifically name in the video.

Her entire family, especially Seamus and myself, are touched by the tribute to her memory.

See you in my dreams baby.


This Week with Tom & Rachi: An Archived Interview with Browning Marean

October 13, 2020

Rachi is on a sabbatical this week so we combed thru the archives of our old interviews to find a substitute for our regular post. Since so many of the people we interviewed over the past five months said the person they would most like to spend a day with was Browning Marean, we thought this interview with Browning would be insightful.  It was recorded in July 2014 and the subject matter is typical Browning: wide ranging over the topics of the duty of technical competence, CLE’s, conferences and yes, getting old.  As always, it has the Browning combination of wit, charm and humor.  I miss you old friend.  


Electronic Discovery in Criminal Cases CLE Webinar with Atty. Brian Capitelli and Tom O’Connor

October 12, 2020
“Be careful what you ask for- you just might get it.”

EDiscovery isn’t just for complex civil cases anymore. The New Orleans Bar Association presents local litigator and experienced criminal law practitioner Brian Capitelli of Capitelli & Wicker and eDiscovery expert Tom O’Connor, also of New Orleans, who will discuss how to selectively target your discovery requests in criminal cases and then how to mine the data you receive for electronic treasure

Wednesday Oct.21st at 2PM Central

Click here to register


Tom O Chats with Gayle O: A First On the eDiscovery Channel

September 22, 2020

Tom chats with one of his favorite people in the eDiscovery space, his younger sister Gayle. She gives some tips on flourishing in today’s work at home environment along with some specific tips on using social media for marketing and client development, especially with Zoom. She discusses Ari Kaplan’s Virtual Lunch and how it has brought a sense of “normalcy” into her day and finally, both Gayle and Tom turn to a discussion of wellness in these tough times.


Hunger: The Side of the COVID Pandemic Nobody Is Talking About

August 4, 2020

We all know that the COVID-19 pandemic has caused unemployment to skyrocket. Shuttered businesses, lost wages, closed schools, and social distancing have led to hundreds of thousands of our neighbors to face hunger on a daily basis.

Here in Louisiana, I’ve long been a big supporter of 2nd Harvest, a local independent non-profit food bank. I personally know what a good job they do. I’ve volunteered there. Our son Seamus has volunteered there.

In the last four months they have distributed 24 million pounds of food, double the amount distributed at the same time last year. During that same period they have been delivering 10,000 meals daily from their Community Kitchen to seniors, children, the newly unemployed, and homeless individuals and families who are facing hunger.

I urge everyone who can afford it to give a couple of bucks to their local food bank. It doesn’t take much. At 2nd Harvest, every $1 helps provide 4 meals for a family in need and $0.97 of every $1 donated goes directly to programs that feed the hungry.

If you can’t find a food bank where you live, 2nd Harvest would welcome your donation. https://no-hunger.org/.

The name says it all


New Relativity One UI Makes It Extremely Easy for Users to Get to Work Right Away.

June 22, 2020

RelOne AERO

Relativity held their annual Relativity Fest London event virtually in May this year and the keynote speaker, Relativity chief product officer Chris Brown, spoke about both their recently announced pay as you go pricing model and the new, currently under soft release, UI for RelOne called Aero.

RelOne has been around for four years and while changes to the interface have been going on for about 3 years, the Advanced Access Group came into play in early to mid-April and began working with this completely new UI. The group consists of 2 channel partners, two corporations, and two law firms, all of which have been instrumental in guiding the development of the UI with their enhanced feedback.

Relativity has been saying that Aero is more than just a fresh coat of paint and current users are being quoted as saying the new “ease of use and simplicity” is “… already having an impact.”

All this discussion of course piqued my interest, so I cast around, watched several of their webcasts and was finally able to arrange a personalized demo firsthand. Aero won’t be officially released until September, but it is commercially available now through providers in the Aero Advance Access program. Here’s what it looks like.

Overall, the 3 main goals of Aero set out by Relativity are:

Intuitive Workflow

Designed to get you to what you need faster, RelativityOne delivers an intuitive and streamlined platform, reducing unnecessary clicks and decisions so you have exactly what you need to accomplish your work.

Light-Speed Performance

Aero delivers what you need fast. Whether you’re flying doc-to-doc, running batch operations, or moving across the platform, everything is available when and where you need it.  Documents with large page counts load much faster now rendering on a page by page basis rather than waiting for the entire doc to render.

Easy Navigation

With logical workflows, step-by-step navigation, and simplified processes you can move through the platform without thinking about where you go next.  The modernized aesthetics have removed ~70k clicks and has minimized cursor travel to increase efficiency.

My specific impressions of the feature set are:

  1. First major change that you will see is that the tabs on the top now become categories on the left
  2. There are no default categories yet but there eventually be some based on a user profile or case defaults
  3. Document previews show in a viewer window which is a view only mode, but you can click on the DocID to bring up the full document and perform coding
  4. The full doc viewer has the complete doc listing on the left and you can jump to any document
  5. You can also pop up document history or image thumbnails as you scroll
  6. The dashboard is collapsible
  7. Ability to save searches as well as the long overdue ability for searching over mass searches feature and a mass copy/move/delete feature
  8. Filtering is available by person or by date
  9. Search enhancements include:
    • Searching for emojis or emoticons
    • Persistent highlights
    • Search for ASCII symbols
    • Highlight one term and focus search
    • Find conceptually similar in a paragraph
    • Display zero hits
  10. Direct loading of documents
    • Can drag and drop up to 100 “loose documents”
    • With large files, can look at pages that have loaded while the remainder of the loading continues.  Large docs are now in essence rendered on a page by page basis
  11. Adjust extracted text size in a manner that is similar to resizing columns in Excel
  12. Hardware agnostic
  13. Browser agnostic
  14. May have some version requirements especially with regards to the working version of Windows
  15. Field creation can occur on the fly
  16. Automatic workflows including:
    • Automated DT search updating as data is loaded
    • Analytics
    • Privilege lists
    • These will require setting a rule simultaneous to loading
  17. Predictive coding
  18. Azure
    • Hosting
    • Invariant processing

A general release was originally planned for September although it remains to be seen if the COVID-19 pandemic has any effect on that. As the graphic below shows, however, Aero is available now. Pricing is a currently said to be a flat subscription fee plus a user charge or pay as you go based on usage.

If you’d like to chat more about Aero or arrange for a demo the way I did, just contact me at toconnor@gulfltc.com.